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Sunday, 17 January 2010

Hot Blooded

First week of the year? Largely spent indulging nostalgia with 90's alt rock and stumbling around balancing missed releases of '09 with those soon to see the light of day in 2010, if I'm honest.

This last week has been much more productive, however, with a far better handle on which bands will be releasing new material in the next few months. In some cases this has yielded a preview mp3 or two, one of which is, happily, Blood Red Shoes.

The Brighton duo first caught attention in the UK with a stream of singles in 2007, leading up to their fiery debut, Box of Secrets, the following year.They return this year with a follow up that, in the words of the band,"feels a lot darker and eerie. It has more complex song structures and intricate guitar parts than before".

This definitelyrings true on lead off track Colours Fade- available free, as you can see above - as the song builds from the quiet but ominous drum pounding intro to a crescendo of guitars, haunting singing, and backing vocals that chant relentlessly, as if to drive the listener into a state of catatonia. This does indeed feel more exploratory and bleaker than the spindly, upbeat indie rock sound that powered their debut.

Bands will rarely speak up and admit to shooting for the exact same style they delivered on previous albums, so often the generic response wheeled out will be darker/faster/harder/bettererer etc. In the case of Fire Like This though, it feels like they may well have produced something worthy of these darker musings.

Blood Red Shoes tour Europe in this first quarter, building up to the release of the album right at the start of March. It will be intriguing to hear whether the type of fire hinted at on Colours Fade blazes into an inferno engulfing the album as a whole.

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